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Today, we’re happy to share with you a new addition to ParkMyCloud: “Zero-Touch Parking”! This policy engine applies start/stop schedules and policies to cloud instances.

Zero-Touch Parking will allow you to “take your hands off the wheel” once you have configured the policies for your environment and let ParkMyCloud apply the parking schedules for automatic cloud cost optimization. Additional functionality from the ParkMyCloud policy engine lets you create security and governance rules, described below. You will save time and save money on cloud costs. It’s easier than ever!

Zero-Touch Parking – Automated Schedule Assignment

The highlight of this new release is Zero-Touch Parking. This is our most-frequently requested feature, and we’re happy to deliver. Now, ParkMyCloud account administrators will be able to automatically attach or detach schedules to new and existing EC2 instances based on keywords.

For example, let’s say your development instances are all tagged with the keyword “dev”. Let’s also say that these instances need to run during an 8 AM to 6 PM workday, Monday through Friday. You can create a parking schedule that has instances run during those hours, and park outside those hours — let’s call it the “dev schedule”. Now, you can also create a rule that all instances tagged “dev” will automatically be assigned the “dev schedule” upon discovery by ParkMyCloud. No touch needed from that point on!

Policy Engine – Automated Security & Governance Measures

In addition to automated cost savings with Zero-Touch Parking, ParkMyCloud’s new policy engine increases security and eases governance. Administrators can create rules to automatically assign instances to teams of users, and to protect certain instances, such as mission-critical production environments, from accidentally being turned off by users.

Administrators will be able to assign:

• Schedules – automatically attach or detach a parking schedule (as described above)

• Restrictions

• Snooze only – instances are always parked, users “snooze to use”
• Never park – instances cannot be parked or toggled, so for example, production instances are never parked
• Teams –  automatically assign new resources to teams during discovery

Time and Money Savings

With automated policies, you’ll save even more time with ParkMyCloud as you save money. On that note, we recently reached an exciting milestone at ParkMyCloud: our customers have now collectively saved over $1 million on their cloud bills. During the next year, we expect customers to save over $5 million. There’s a long way to go to eliminate what we estimate is $5.6 billion in wasted cloud spend every year, but we’re making a dent – our customers have cut their cloud spend significantly.

We look forward to attacking cloud waste from multiple angles with support for additional cloud providers beyond AWS. We plan to release support for Microsoft Azure at the beginning of January, 2017, with Google Cloud Platform support to follow.

Tweet about Zero-Touch parking and get 1 month of ParkMyCloud free! (Email us to get your free month.)

Then, try out the new Zero-Touch Parking & policy engine for yourself with a free 30-day trial. Happy parking!